According to current history of science, Levi-Civita introduced parallel transport solely to give a geometrical interpretation to the covariant derivative of absolute differential calculus. Levi-Civita, however, searched a simple computation of the curvature of a Riemannian manifold, basing on notions of the Italian school of mathematical physics of his time: holonomic constraints, virtual displacements and work, which so have a remarkable, if not dominant, role in the origin of parallel transport.

We examine some of Connes’ criticisms of Robinson’s infinitesimals starting in 1995. Connes sought to exploit the Solovay model S as ammunition against non-standard analysis, but the model tends to boomerang, undercutting Connes’ own earlier work in functional analysis. Connes described the hyperreals as both a “virtual theory” and a “chimera”, yet acknowledged that his argument relies on the transfer principle. We analyze Connes’ “dart-throwing” thought experiment, but reach an opposite conclusion. In S , all definable sets of (...) reals are Lebesgue measurable, suggesting that Connes views a theory as being “virtual” if it is not definable in a suitable model of ZFC. If so, Connes’ claim that a theory of the hyperreals is “virtual” is refuted by the existence of a definable model of the hyperreal field due to Kanovei and Shelah. Free ultrafilters aren’t definable, yet Connes exploited such ultrafilters both in his own earlier work on the classification of factors in the 1970s and 80s, and in Noncommutative Geometry, raising the question whether the latter may not be vulnerable to Connes’ criticism of virtuality. We analyze the philosophical underpinnings of Connes’ argument based on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and detect an apparent circularity in Connes’ logic. We document the reliance on non-constructive foundational material, and specifically on the Dixmier trace −∫ (featured on the front cover of Connes’ magnum opus) and the Hahn–Banach theorem, in Connes’ own framework. We also note an inaccuracy in Machover’s critique of infinitesimal-based pedagogy. (shrink)

We discuss central aspects of history of the concept of an affine differentiable manifold, as a proposal confirming the need for using some quantitative methods (drawn from elementary Model Theory) in Mathematical Historiography. In particular, we prove that this geometric structure is a syntactic rigid designator in the sense of Kripke-Putnam.

In this work I propose a theory of evolution as a process of unfolding. This theory is based on four logically concatenated principles. The principle of evolutionary order establishes that the more complex cannot be generated from the simpler. The principle of origin establishes that there must be a maximum complexity that originates the others by logical deduction. Finally, the principle of unfolding and the principle of actualization guarantee the development of the evolutionary process from the (...) simplest to the most complex. These logical principles determine the existence of a virtual ideological matrix that contains the sequence of the preformed and folded morphogenetic fields. In this manner, the evolutionary process consists of the sequential unfolding and actualization of these fields, which is motorized by a process of teleologization carried out by the opening consciousness of the forms included in the fields of the ideological matrix. This theory leads to a radical change of perspective regarding the materialist worldview, and places life at the center of the evolutionary process as an activity carried out by a consciousness that seeks to fulfill a purpose by actualizing its own potentialities. (shrink)

In almost all of his early works Gilles Deleuze is concerned with one and the same problem: the problem of genesis. In response to this problem, Deleuze argues for a system of heterogenesis. In this article, I argue that Deleuze’s system of heterogenesis operates on three levels: (1) the differential multiplicity of virtual Ideas; (2) the implied multiplicity of intensive dramas; (3) the extensive and qualitative diversity of actual concepts. As I hope to show, the relation between these (...) three levels can be explained in terms of the logic of expression that Deleuze develops in 'Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza.' In this way, I hope to gain clarity without losing nuance. The rather technical and abstract language of expression will become more concrete and understandable when it is understood in terms of intensive dramas, virtual Ideas and actual concepts. At the same time, the three levels of expression make it possible to show how these notions are interlinked. Accordingly, this article is divided in four parts. In the first part, I will explain how Deleuze takes up Kant’s discovery of the principle of difference as a reaction against the model of representation. The second part focuses on the two multiplicities (virtual Ideas and intensive dramas) that produce diversity (actual concepts). In the third part, these two multiplicities are linked to each other with the help of the logic of expression that Deleuze derives from Spinoza. The fourth, concluding part will connect the logic of expression to the complex dynamic of difference and repetition. (shrink)

Among the most popular strategies for justifying political obligations are those that appeal to the principle of fairness. These theories face the challenge, canonically articulated by Robert Nozick, of explaining how it is that persons are obligated to schemes when they receive goods that they do not ask for but cannot reject. John Simmons offers one defense of the principle of fairness, arguing that people could be bound by obligations of fairness if they voluntarily accept goods produced by (...) a cooperative scheme. Simmons, however, thinks that such a theory will do little work in justifying political obligations, since virtually no one voluntarily accepts state goods. This paper attempts to advance just such a theory by arguing that states are in fact genuine cooperative schemes and that Simmons is overly pessimistic in his appraisal of whether the majority of citizens accept the goods provided by their states. (shrink)

Normative political theorists have been growing more and more aware of the many difficult questions raised by the discretionary power inevitably left to public administrators. This article aims to advance a novel normative principle, called ‘principle of restraint’, regulating reform of established administrative agencies. I argue that the ability of public administrators to exercise their power in accordance with the requirements of public reason is protected by an attitude of restraint on the part of potential reformers. Specifically, they (...) should refrain from any reform of an administrative agency that involves a switch to a considerably more loosely interconnected system of values underlying the work of that agency. To illustrate the importance of the principle of restraint, I examine a case from British health policy, showing that a recent reform of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence well exemplifies the serious problems brought by any violation of that principle. (shrink)

During the eighteenth century, German philosophers wrote on a broad range of topics in moral philosophy: from meta-ethical issues such as the nature of obligation, to elaborate systems of normative ethics (often in the form of a doctrine of duties to self, others, and God), to topics in applied ethics such as the permissibility of the death penalty and censorship. Moral philosophy was also intimately related to the modern natural law tradition at the time, as well as to discussions taking (...) place in theology and psychology, to name only a few other disciplines. As a result, it is often hard to isolate eighteenth-century German moral philosophy without addressing a whole host of other philosophical subjects. There are nonetheless certain central topics that were discussed by nearly every major figure of the period and which therefore serve as a window into how German philosophers approached moral philosophy during the eighteenth century. In this chapter I illustrate that one such topic is the principle of morality; namely what philosophers took to be the supreme norm at the foundation of judging actions to be morally good or evil. As we will see, although several figures approached this principle in a broadly similar way by identifying “perfection” as the central concept at work, they differ considerably with respect to important details. Furthermore, certain common threads reveal themselves: philosophers differ not only with respect to the content of the principle, but also with respect to the way in which it can be derived, how particular duties can in turn be derived from the supreme principle, and how the principle can be formulated. I begin by outlining Christian Wolff’s influential principle of perfection (Section 1), followed by a consideration of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s subtle revision of this principle (Section 2) and Christian August Crusius’s theological alternative (Section 3). I then briefly consider the impact that the reception of eighteenth-century British philosophy had on German moral philosophy during the second half of the eighteenth century (Section 4), before considering Moses Mendelssohn’s and Immanuel Kant’s answers to the 1763 Prize Essay Question (Section 5) and Johann August Eberhard’s unique mixture of rationalism and empiricism from the early 1780s (Section 6). I conclude (Section 7) with a brief discussion of Kant’s approach to the principle of morality and the principle of happiness proposed against it by his early empiricist critics. (shrink)

This short article represents the first attempt to define a new core cultural value that will enable engaging the business sector in humankind’s mission to heal nature. First, I start with defining the problem of the current business culture and the extant thinking on how to solve environmental problems, which I called “the eco-deficit culture.” Then, I present a solution to this problem by formulating the “semiconducting principle” of monetary and environmental values exchange, which I believe can generate “an (...) eco-surplus business culture.” This work adds one new element, the eleventh cultural value, to the ten core values of progressive cultures postulated by Harrison (2000). (shrink)

The Principle of Sufficient Reason is very seldom, if ever, referred to in the works of whom we might think of as the eminent Asian metaphysicians. In spite of this, the big picture metaphysical views available in the thought of philosophers such as Nāgārjuna, Fazang and Nishida appear to share certain structural features with views more familiar to us from our own tradition; views that explicitly accept or reject the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Nāgārjuna looks to develop (...) a kind of metaphysical infinitism, Fazang an extreme form of coherentism, and Nishida a species of foundationalism. These three positions - infinitism, coherentism and foundationalism - are typically thought to exhaust the spread of possibilities by those working within the Western tradition. -/- In spite of their similarities to positions advanced within our own tradition, the cosmologies of many of the giants of Asian philosophy are characterised by their rather striking conclusions. Amongst such conclusions for Nāgārjuna is that everything is empty; for Fazang that everything is identical to everything else; and for Nishida that everything depends on absolute nothingness. If the Principle of Sufficient Reason is playing a role in the derivation of such striking conclusions, then it looks that there are more options regarding the metaphysical structure of the world available to us than our own tradition typically courts. If, on the other hand, these striking cosmological conclusions are arrived at without any consideration of sufficient reason, then there may well be ways of reasoning about the overarching structure of reality that are powerful but unfamiliar to Western thinking. In this contribution, I explore what, if any, role the PSR might be playing in the thought of Nāgārjuna , Fazang and Nishida, and what we might be able to learn from it. (shrink)

Mill’s Principle of Utility: Origins, Proof, and Implications (Leiden: Brill, 2022) is a scholarly monograph on John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism with a particular emphasis on his proof of the principle of utility. Originally published as Mill’s Principle of Utility: A Defense of John Stuart Mill’s Notorious Proof (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1994), the present volume is a revised and enlarged edition with additional material, tighter arguments, crisper discussions, and updated references. The initiative is still principally an analysis, interpretation, (...) and defense of the controversial proof, which has yet to attract a scholarly consensus on how it works and whether it succeeds. Well over a century and a half after Mill’s contribution, the subject matter continues to figure prominently in classroom discussions, where the principle and its proof are presented and debated in connection with the critical baggage of logical problems and conceptual confusions wrongly attributed to Mill from the beginning. The overarching aim of the book, now supplemented by a comprehensive historical background and salient philosophical implications, remains the vindication of Mill’s reasoning in pursuit of what he promises as a proof of the principle of utility. (shrink)

In this essay, “The Principle of Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory: Its Rise and Fall,” Pauline Kleingeld notes that Kant’s Principle of Autonomy, which played a central role in both the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, disappeared by the time of the Metaphysics of Morals. She argues that its disappearance is due to significant changes in Kant’s political philosophy. The Principle of Autonomy states that one ought to act as if (...) one were giving universal laws through one’s maxims. The criterion of just legislation that Kant accepted in the mid-1780s does not require any actual consent on the part of the citizens—genuine universality is sufficient for a law to be just. Hence, at that time, Kant could indeed explicate the criterion governing the moral permissibility of one’s maxims by drawing an analogy with the criterion governing the justice of political laws. In the Metaphysics of Morals and in other works in the 1790s, however, he added the further condition that laws must be given with the consent of the citizens. With this further condition, the moral criterion was no longer fully analogous to the criterion for political laws being just. Accordingly, Kleingeld argues, Kant dropped the Principle of Autonomy, which was firmly based on that analogy. (shrink)

The thesis that in order to genuinely think about a particular object one must be (in some sense) acquainted with that object has been thoroughly explored since it was put forward by Bertrand Russell. Recently, the thesis has come in for mounting criticism. The aim of this paper is to point out that neither the exploration nor the criticism have been sensitive to the fact that the thesis can be interpreted in two different ways, yielding two different principles of acquaintance. (...) One principle uses the notion of content in distinguishing genuine thinking-about things from a merely derivative kind of thinking-about things. The other principle is quiet about content, focusing instead on a distinction between satisfactional and non-satisfactional means of bringing things into thought. Most work has focused on the first, content-based principle of acquaintance. But criticisms of this principle do not apply straightforwardly to the non-content-based principle. I shall argue that the latter principle merits independent assessment as part of the broader effort to account for genuine thinking about particular objects. In the final section of the paper, I will sketch a roadmap for this assessment. (shrink)

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) holds that, for everything that exists or occurs or holds true, there is a reason why that is the case. I consider three possible ways of relating physics to the PSR: past states as reasons for present states, reasons why the laws of physics take the form that they do, and reasons why there is anything at all. In each case I suggest that the PSR is not the best way of thinking about (...) how and why physics works. -/- Invited reflection for The Principle of Sufficient Reason (Oxford Philosophical Concepts), Eds. F. Amijee and M. Della Rocca (forthcoming 2024). (shrink)

Basal cognition investigates cognition working upward from nonneuronal organisms. Because basal cognition is committed to empirically testable hypotheses, a methodological challenge arises: how can experiments avoid using zoocentric assumptions that ignore the ecological contexts that might elicit cognitively driven behavior in nonneuronal organisms? To meet this challenge, I articulate the principle of dynamic holism (PDH), a methodological principle for guiding research on nonneuronal cognition. I describe PDH’s relation to holistic research programs in human-focused cognitive science and psychology then (...) present an argument from analogy based on holistic developmental biology. Last, I examine two experiments exemplifying the need for PDH. (shrink)

In response to the spread of COVID-19, governments across the world have, with very few exceptions, enacted sweeping restrictive lockdown policies that impede citizens’ freedom to move, work, and assemble. This paper critically responds to the central arguments for restrictive lockdown legislation. We build our critique on the following assumption: public policy that enjoys virtually unanimous support worldwide should be justified by uncontroversial moral principles. We argue that that the virtually unanimous support in favor of restrictive lockdowns is not adequately (...) justified by the arguments given in favor of them. Importantly, this is not to say that states ought not impose restrictive lockdown measures, but rather that the extent of the acceptance of these measures is not proportionate to the strength of the arguments for lockdowns. -/- We begin by exploring the case for restrictive lockdowns. We first argue that several of the principles that are used to justify the lockdowns yield unexpectedly revisionary implications for other political problems that many would be unwilling to accept. We then outline what we consider the strongest argument for a lockdown—namely, that its net welfare benefits are great enough to defeat the moral presumption against restricting citizens’ civil liberties to move, work, and assemble. However, we give a number of reasons for doubting that the lockdown’s net welfare benefits are, in fact, sufficiently high to defeat the presumption against it. (shrink)

This paper shows that several live philosophical and scientific hypotheses – including the holographic principle and multiverse theory in quantum physics, and eternalism and mind-body dualism in philosophy – jointly imply an audacious new theory of free will. This new theory, "Libertarian Compatibilism", holds that the physical world is an eternally existing array of two-dimensional information – a vast number of possible pasts, presents, and futures – and the mind a nonphysical entity or set of properties that "read" that (...) physical information off to subjective conscious awareness (in much the same way that a song written on an ordinary compact-disc is only played when read by an outside medium, i.e. a CD-player). According to this theory, every possible physical “timeline” in the multiverse may be fully physically deterministic or physically-causally closed but each person’s consciousness still entirely free to choose, ex nihilo, outside of the physical order, which physically-closed timeline is experienced by conscious observers. Although Libertarian Compatibilism is admittedly fantastic, I show that it not only follows from several live scientific and philosophical hypotheses, I also show that it (A) is a far more explanatorily powerful model of quantum mechanics than more traditional interpretations (e.g. the Copenhagen, Everett, and Bohmian interpretations), (B) makes determinate, testable empirical predictions in quantum theory, and finally, (C) predicts and explains the very existence of a number of philosophical debates and positions in the philosophy of mind, time, personal identity, and free will. First, I show that whereas traditional interpretations of quantum mechanics are all philosophically problematic and roughly as ontologically “extravagant” as Libertarian Compatibilism – in that they all posit “unseen” processes – Libertarian Compatibilism is nearly identical in structure to the only working simulation that human beings have ever constructed capable of reproducing (and so explaining) every general feature of quantum mechanics we perceive: namely, massive-multiplayer-online-roleplaying videogames (or MMORPGs). Although I am not the first to suggest that our world is akin to a computer simulation, I show that existing MMORPGs (online simulations we have already created) actually reproduce every general feature of quantum mechanics within their simulated-world reference-frames. Second, I show that existing MMORPGs also replicate (and so explain) many philosophical problems we face in the philosophy of mind, time, personal identity, and free will – all while conforming to the Libertarian Compatibilist model of reality. -/- I conclude, as such, that as fantastic and metaphysically extravagant as Libertarian Compatibilism may initially seem, it may well be true. It explains a number of features of our reality that no other physical or metaphysical theory does. (shrink)

In its strongest, unqualified form the principle of wholistic reference is that each and every proposition refers to the whole universe of discourse as such, regardless how limited the referents of its non-logical or content terms. Even though Boole changed from a monistic fixed-universe framework in his earlier works of 1847 and 1848 to a pluralistic multiple-universe framework in his mature treatise of 1854, he never wavered in his frank avowal of the principle of wholistic reference, possibly (...) in a slightly weaker form. Indeed, he took it as an essential accompaniment to his theory of concept formation and proposition formation. Similar views are found in later logicians, and some of the most recent formulations of standard, one-sorted first-order logic seem to be in accord with a form of it, if they do not actually imply the principle itself. (shrink)

In its strongest, unqualified form the principle of wholistic reference is that each and every proposition refers to the whole universe of discourse as such, regardless how limited the referents of its non-logical or content terms. Even though Boole changed from a monistic fixed-universe framework in his earlier works of 1847 and 1848 to a pluralistic multiple-universe framework in his mature treatise of 1854, he never wavered in his frank avowal of the principle of wholistic reference, possibly (...) in a slightly weaker form. Indeed, he took it as an essential accompaniment to his theory of concept formation and proposition formation. Similar views are found in later logicians, and some of the most recent formulations of standard, one-sorted first-order logic seem to be in accord with a form of it, if they do not actually imply the principle itself.Em sua forma mais forte e geral, o princípio da referência universalista afirma que toda proposição refere-se ao universo completo do discurso propriamente dito, independentemente de quão limitados sejam os referentes de seus termos não-lógicos ou com conteúdo. Embora Boole mudasse de um modelo monístico de universo-fixo nos seus trabalhos iniciais de 1847 e 1848 para um modelo pluralista de universo-múltiplo no seu tratado maduro de 1854, ele nunca hesitou em sua aceitação franca do princípio da referência universalista, possivelmente em uma forma ligeiramente mais fraca. De fato, ele considerou este princípio como um acompanhamento essencial para a sua teoria de formação de conceitos e de proposições. Visões semelhantes são encontradas em lógicos posteriores, e algumas das mais recentes formulações da lógica clássica de primeira ordem parecem estar de acordo com uma forma deste, se é que elas não implicam, de fato, o próprio princípio. (shrink)

June 2022 A Revolutionary New Metaphysics, Based on Consciousness, and a Call to All Philosophers We are in a unique moment of our history unlike any previous moment ever. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. As I write, the planet is in deep trouble, heat, fires, great storms, and record flooding, (...) weather patterns drastic everywhere. Capitalism has been so successful in supplying us with an endless array of consumer items, that we have never noticed there is a cost. But there is a cost, the cost is the very life of the Earth herself, and now the day of reckoning is here. Days of reckoning are most often days of rath. But I am hoping that this is a day of major Awakening over the entire planet. We have caused a crisis so great for the Earth we can hardly get our minds around it. But I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis are ideas, about who and what the Earth is, Ourselves, and what we are here for. I am proposing that this is a call to all philosophy and philosophers to rethink ourselves from the ground up. The human race has never gotten the Earth right and now we must, for the Earth is the true foundation for civilization. We are in deep trouble with the Earth, and it owes to the fact that the great male thinkers never got the Earth right, they could never make the connection between the life of mind and the life of the Earth. I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis we are in are ideas. And that in fact the planet is in the grip of a false metaphysics, and scientific image of nature that really comes most recently from Descartes. His conviction that matter, and with it the Earth, are simply the weighable, the measurable the extended in space and time, utterly devoid of any inner life of mind thoughts or Consciousness. This view of matter and the Earth goes back to the very dawn of thought, Descartes is just its most recent and comprehensive version of things. This view of matter is really a false metaphysics that dominates most of the modern world and underpins the whole scientific image of nature itself. I am proposing this is a false metaphysics and offering a new version of things based on Consciousness. If there is a single idea fueling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something without Consciousness. When you intend to ravage and savage the planet, turn it into consumer items to be converted into money in the bank, first pretend that all of the bright beings in the natural world are devoid of Consciousness, just “things” you do not have to have any conscious about destroying them. I am proposing that this term Consciousness, that has appeared as term and a problem for modern science, is the key to getting ourselves right with the Earth. I propose this new theory for science will ramify into every other disciplines as well, and the ways we think just about everything. This old paradigm based on a false theory of matter, has run its course, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction. We need new ideas, and we need them now. You will find my recent work in the Scientific God Journal under the title: Consciousness as the Organizing Principle, and a very complete version of my arguments for this term Consciousness, along with radical reinterpretation of modern science itself, on the Galileo Commission site. It is a radical moment for all of the thinkers among us, take this as my small contribution to rethinking ourselves in new terms, based on my understanding that the true basis for the whole of Being, the Universe, the Cosmos, and with them Ourselves, is this term Consciousness. And unpack it. And I predict that with this term Consciousness every intractable human problem in both science and the modern world will go down like a line of dominos before it. And so, here are a few new ideas I would offer you. These are the times of the Reappearance of the Feminine, a great Awakening as of Springtime after a long dark and lonely Winter. We are leaving behind us an old civilization based on male dominance, fear lies and control, now in decay, disease, and death disintegrating all around us. We are moving into a whole new civilization based on Love and Truth. A new civilization requires new basic terms values and first principles. And so, I return to Descartes. 1. Just over 300 years ago a young man travelling with the army found himself stranded in a foreign town in a bare room lit by a candle with nothing to do but think. And in a couple of nights Descartes laid the entire thought foundations for modern science and most of the modern world. It isn’t clear that modern philosophers with their funding sources of grants, their graduate students, their reputation and all the perks and privileges of academia can do any better. Descartes claimed there are just two principles in the Universe, Matter and Mind. God was pure mind; human beings were mind and matter. And we are the only ones on the planet with mind. Everything else all of the bright array of beings who share the planet with us are simply matter. And matter? The weighable the measurable the extended in space and time utterly devoid of any inner life of thoughts, feelings, or Consciousness This classification was a boon for developing science. Scientists did not have to worry about any inner life in nature, ideas or Consciousness, they could just set about weighing and measuring, as they have until the present day. But it was a disaster for the Earth. Earth was once worshiped as a Goddess. With Descartes she became almost overnight “things.” Simply commodities and resources, an endless of supply of consumer items, to be turned into money in the bank. And now Descartes concept of matter is up for us. If there is a single idea that is enabling and driving the destruction of the Earth, it is the conviction that Earth is something without Consciousness. This whole scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is driving the destruction of the Earth, and driving us all insane, and it needs to change. Ever since Descartes formulated Dualism, scientists and philosophers have been trying to get rid of it. They have done this by attempting to make matter the fundamental term of reality, and to explain mind or Consciousness in terms of matter. And now, Consciousness has emerged as term and a problem for modern science. 2. The prevailing Universe picture has been mainly based on the belief that Consciousness appears only at the end of evolution in ourselves and some of the higher animals when matter attains “a certain state of complexity” and it is produced by neurons in the brain. But Consciousness is nothing real in itself, the neurons are doing the work, Consciousness is simply a byproduct of neural activity. As William James summed up this position, not his: Consciousness is to the brain as a shadow to the runner, it runs beside him but never influences his stride. And so, the great problem of neuroscience: How do neurons produce Consciousness? So far, no one has been able to say how. All we have is parallelism. Two processes are running in parallel a train of neural events and a train of Consciousness events. And so, which one is primary? The face of neuroscience and much of the modern world is that the neural events are what is really real, Consciousness is secondary. The conviction that Consciousness is something produced by neurons is so deeply held and has been so for so long, that it seems like an obvious fact. It is in fact an assumption and a theory, and it could all well be the other way around. The scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is now up for us. It has enabled the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a unique place in our own evolution where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, there are the best reasons for rethinking Descartes concepts of matter. Scientists and philosophers have been trying to escape dualism by making matter the fundamental term. And now, this has not worked. In a nutshell: The mind body problem, the “hard problem of Consciousness” ---how do neurons in the brain, atoms and molecules give rise to ideas thoughts and feelings and who what and where is the “I” who sees them? And then, the near-death experience. I remind you of the truth of the near-death experience. The body in the bed is brain dead eeg flat, but the patient, pure Consciousness is hovering at the ceiling watching the doctors work over the body below, able to read dials he could not have seen from the bed, sometimes able to events in the corridor beyond the room, all subsequently confirmed by the doctors. Evidence as good as it gets that the patient really was out of his body. And so, the patient is able to see without eyes, hear without ears and to think and remember without a brain. There is not a single scientific principle that can account for this. And I am proposing that the near-death experience is a threshold and a key for a much deeper understanding of the Universe. These three problems are so hard they cannot be solved by present scientific principles and therefore call all present principles and ways of thought into question. When your axioms cannot account for the data, it is time to drop them and find better fundamental terms. We have not been able to solve the problems of Consciousness with the assumption that matter is the most basic and fundamental term. And so, if Cartesian dualism is to be overcome at all, we need to try it the other way around. 3. We are in the position of Copernicus. Remember Copernicus? He was making his calculations on the assumption that the Earth was the center of the Universe until they became so unwieldy that he decided to try it all the other way around. To make the sun the center, the Earth revolving around it. And lo, all of his data fell neatly into place. I am proposing a whole new Universe picture. Evolution makes us continuous with every other being, Consciousness would not be in us if it were not in them also, and then, in the atoms and molecules and cells that make up living beings. I propose to make Consciousness the most basic term and see what follows. I am in fact, proposing a new Copernican Revolution, that Consciousness is the true basis for the Universe and the right fundamental term, for science itself all other disciplines as well, and the whole of the modern world. And I predict that every intractable problem in science or the modern world, will go down like a line of dominos before it. In a nutshell: Consciousness and not matter is “first and fundamental” in the Universe, it is there from the very “Beginning” everything has it and all of the true causalities, the explanatory principles belong to it. Not to matter. What then is matter? All matter is an Appearance of something much more real, Consciousness. All matter is an expression of Consciousness, even the least little bit of matter contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. And so, we revise the scientific image of nature. Science at present is two termed, matter/energy. It needs to become three termed: Matter/energy/Consciousness, with the recognition that all of the basic principles, the true causalities of events, and of the Universe belong to Consciousness. And now physics. To accommodate this new Universe picture physics needs to alter just one term, energy. All energy contains Consciousness, that idea alone will change our world forever. The animals the trees the plants are just as conscious as we are, as is the Earth herself, a continuum of many forms of Consciousness of which our own is one. The Earth consists of interacting and intersecting forms of Consciousness, Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness. A remarkable work has just appeared entitled “Beyond Words What Animals Feel and Think.” Describing in detail how like ourselves all of the animals are. And the more we can see how like us everything else really is, the harder it will be for us to do them all in, in the interest of turning them into consumer items. And so, here is a new principle of understanding, that entails completely new forms of explanation, and a whole new Universe picture to be spelled out in terms of Consciousness and its various properties. This is a Universe that is aware awake and Enspirited throughout. And so, there is only one principle, not two. And so, how does Consciousness work? There is “no mind/body problem.” My Consciousness is aligning the Consciousness of neurons in the brain, that aligns the Consciousness of all other cells in the body, that aligns the Consciousness of molecules and atoms themselves. Mainly from the top down, but also interactive, and not reduction to the purely physical forces. 4. And so, here is a radical new Universe picture, and with it a new way to think about the Universe itself, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. It requires a complete revision of both of the terms of modern science itself. The problem of the modern world owes in deep measure to Descartes concept of matter as something devoid of interior life. But he is only the most powerful and simple expression of a whole tradition of thought that predates him, that goes back to the very dawn of thought itself. It owes to the conviction of both Plato and Aristotle that the Earth was something devoid of reason, or mind, and therefore something to be held in complete contempt. We are emerging from a civilization based on contempt for the Earth, and down the road, it will become contempt for the body, sex, women, the Native people, and people of color everywhere. And so, this entire tradition is now up for us, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction, and we need to get beyond it. I am proposing that this term Consciousness is the way out. The missing piece of the puzzle and the idea whose time has come. And it will enable us to move into a completely new civilization based on respect for the Earth, women, sex, people of color, that honors everyone and has a place for all. Revolutions in science occur when new data show up that cannot be accounted for by existing paradigms (Thomas Kuhns: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Consciousness, and all the properties and problems of Consciousness are just such data, and they compel a new scientific revolution. But we are a scientific age. A new Copernican revolution in science is such as revolution everywhere. And Consciousness is the key to getting every other reality at all levels and depths right as well. It will enable us finally to get the Earth right, get ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. Archimedes: Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world. I am proposing a new synthesis among our fundamental terms in which this term Consciousness is the new lynchpin. And so, I return once more to Descartes. Descartes in the Mediations was a dualist, they were two realities interacting in the pineal gland mind and body. But Descartes age was high on “Cartesianisms,” on Descartes concept of matter. Animals were simply cleverly wired machines (Hobbes called them automata). Rumor had it that Descartes followers went about kicking dogs reasoning that their howls were not due to any feelings of pain, but simply the wiring of the machine. We have been doing this to the Earth ever since, and now the Earth is not going to stand for it any longer. It is time we all woke up. There is no matter in Descartes sense of it, or in Plato and Aristotle’s sense of it. This old concept of matter is embedded in all of the crisis and catastrophes---fires, drought, pandemics, over population, the disintegrating economies, our ways of life, capitalism and consumerism themselves. All matter is Enspirited, contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. Now I tell you something about Descartes you may not know. In the Mediations was a dualist, there are minds and bodies. But by the end of his life, he knew the truth. Descartes guided his whole life by these vivid dreams, and toward the end of his life he had this dream: He saw the Universe as a giant machine and in the heart of the machine propelling the whole, was Consciousness. And so, out of the shades and shadows and into the light of day. Here is a renewed and a new science, a new cosmology. And with it, a revolutionary new metaphysics. The whole of the modern world is in the grip of a false metaphysics, based on Descartes theory of matter. Here is a new, and finally true metaphysics based on the single term, Consciousness. 5. And in all my works, I spell out this new metaphysics based on Consciousness, and what it means for how we think about virtually everything: The Universe, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. Of who, what and where Spirit is, that we may connect with Spirit everywhere. There is only one term for the Universe, and not two, this single term Consciousness, that manifests itself in two modes: Consciousness in Form, Consciousness Formless. And so, here is a sketch of what this new term Consciousness really means. For four great aspects of the real, four new cornerstones for a whole new civilization on Earth, based on Love and Truth. A. For the Universe: New causalities, all matter is an expression of Consciousness, awake and aware, Enspirited throughout, which has a place for the causalities of love ideas intent plan and purpose, what Aristotle called final causality, that for the sake of which. And it has a place for subjectivity, the greatest mystery in the whole of the Universe, knowable only in ourselves, but there in everything else as well, bedrock in the chain of causalities. The buck stops here. Here are two very different Universe pictures. The Cartesian Universe consists of things, pushed, and pulled around by the physical forces that function blind. The true Universe consists of selves and not things. Selves at least in ourselves, are organized and focused about an I, an I am, or a sense of self in everything, ever other being dear to itself. Just one aspect of subjectivity. And so, it is Consciousness all the way down, and subjectivity all the way down. Science proceeds on the basis of the negligible of what it can leave out as unimportant. Subjectivity is the ultimate animating principle of the Universe. What Descartes really did was to strip from nature what is most essential about it, its animating principle Consciousness. And so, we come out of a long history of “clunk.” The great male thinkers have killed creation. First in concepts and now in the lived life. And so, after centuries of fruitless search, not all of it in vain, finally, and just in time the true basic principle for the Universe has shown up in virtually all disciplines, this term Consciousness. B. And so, the Earth: What does this term Consciousness really mean for the Earth? It means that all of the bright array of beings around us have Consciousness. And the more we can realize how like us they are, the harder it will be to do them all in. Is this what it really means to be “made in the image of Spirit?” To destroy ever other living being? The god of Genesis is a creator god who has created billions and billions of living forms. Man, taking himself to be made in the image of Spirit has destroyed virtually all of it. The Earth is not things, not commodities and resources, not an endless array of consumer goods. The Earth consists of conscious living spiritual beings like ourselves, who need to be honored and respected, nurtured and cared for, to be Loved. And if the human race can finally pull it off and bring Love here and start helping the Earth rather than destroying her, even our vast numbers now at 8 billion, may not matter. Deeply embedded in the modern world is a false cosmology based on the hitherto useful but ultimately false metaphysics of Descartes. In particular it owes to Descartes concepts of matter, and of the Earth, as something devoid of Consciousness. And now this concept is up for us. If there is a single idea enabling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something devoid of Consciousness. And we all have a vested interest in keeping this false concept in place. When you intend to ravage and savage the Earth, to turn it into consumer items, and money in the bank, first pretend she has no Consciousness that way we need not have any conscious about it. We are in deep trouble with the planet. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, here are a few new guiding principles for the planet, based on Consciousness. Consciousness has field properties. The Earth is Consciousness throughout, connected and interconnected throughout, intersecting and interacting fields of Consciousness of which our own is one. To harm one is to harm all. Only this understanding of the Earth can set our destructive technologies, and capitalism, their goals, and their limits. The real problem with capitalism, and with civilization itself is it has no true understanding of the Earth, all the exquisite networks and webworks that connect all beings with one another. Nor it is about to admit that the Earth is our “life support system,” reason gone insane in the modern world. We are destroying our life support system, capitalism is the full expression of the human death wish in the modern world, and it needs to change. And now, let the barriers between ourselves and all other beings go down. C. And so, Ourselves. This new Universe picture based on Consciousness opens into and has a place for new concepts of human identity. In particular, it has a place for reincarnation, a process whereby one Consciousness dons’ bodies again and again and lays them down. This is a process wholly impossible on materialistic theories. This new view of things puts a higher perspective on Freudian determinism, which is a partial knowing in a greater account. We are something more than the victims of genes drives and childhood. We are immortally eternal evolving spiritual beings who take on a cycle of earthly lives in order to achieve certain goals and abilities, and then, our earthly cycle complete, we depart the Earth plane for other areas of the Universe physical or purely spiritual, to continue our evolution elsewhere. The scientific evidence for reincarnation is increasing on all sides, see for example the work of Michael Newton, a mainstream scientist forced to confront the fact of reincarnation. A completely new reincarnational picture is now emerging everywhere. We choose our parents for abilities we could acquire through them. We all come here with reasons for being here, and we all have free will, an original property of Consciousness, and we work out our issues accordingly. We all come here with the same reason for being here. It is to experience the Earth plane and human society at all levels and depths, in every social role, every climate, both sexes male and female and in all races. We are all here to acquire a deep understanding of the Earth plane with all its challenges and all of its present problems. We are not here to devour and consume the Earth, but to honor her for the learning experience she makes available for us. And so, reincarnation is the great equalizer, the fundamental basis for any bill of rights. Many of the problems of the modern world owe to the fact that reincarnation has not been taught in the West. Reincarnation was the center piece of Jesus teachings. It was banned by a fourth century council that decided the populous could best be controlled through fear. They edited all mention of reincarnation from the scriptures, and inserted fear terms instead, a judgmental god, and so on. If reincarnation had been taught, there would have been no suppression of women, but the gift of both sexes would have been honored and developed. And there would have been no reason for contempt for people of color because who they are, we have been or will be. There is no reason to look down on anyone when we know that our own identity includes membership in theirs. The truth of reincarnation needs to be the foundation for getting ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. D. And so, Spirit. This new Universe picture, based on Consciousness, has a place for Spirit as simply Infinite Consciousness. All universes all worlds are formed out of this Consciousness, divine and sacred throughout. And Spirit is everywhere in the Earth and can be connected everywhere. And the Native North American people had things right. Everything has its own Spirit, and without contradiction is also an expression of Spirit. And what I am really doing in terms of concepts of modern science is presenting the Native North American version of the Real. And this new Universe picture has a place for the essential insight of all religions almost smothered by church tradition: Love. Not an emotion but a great Oneness, that can be found everywhere, even in a busy city street. But especially in the Earth, that is levels and depths of Oneness everywhere. And so, for the first time in their long and bitter antagonistic history, science and religion now share a common base with this term Spirit, the lynchpin in a new conceptual framework. And I offer an interpretation of where we are in our history, this present moment of historical grace, and these tumultuous times in which we live, the return of the Goddess and the Divine Feminine, the Reappearance of the Feminine in history, the Advent of Women, this great Awakening, as of Springtime after a long dark Winter, the Awakening, the Second Coming. And so, stay tuned! (shrink)

The laws and principles which predict how perceptual qualities can be extracted from the most elementary visual signals were discovered by the Gestalt psychologists(e.g., Wertheimer,1923; Metzger,1930, translated and re-editedbySpillmann in 2009 and2012, respectively). Their seminal work has inspired visual science ever since, andhas led to exciting discoveries which have confirmed the Gestalt idea that the human brain would have an astonishing capacity for selecting and combining critical visual signals to generate output representations for decision making and action. This capacity of (...) selection and integration enables the perception of form and space, and the correct estimation of relative positions, trajectories, and distances of objects represented in planar images. This paper addresses problems of perceptual organization with critical implications for visual interfaces, and the design of surgical simulator platforms in particular. (shrink)

Following the inferences of my previous work "Monadic Conditionality", this work further investigates the nature of being-for-itself's transformations and what happens with any being-for-itself in between eternal returns, completing a quasi-principled view on immortality (suggested and started in my previous work). Through mathematical reasoning, this model infers that infinitesimal differences between successive event lines grow gradually across subspaces, until reaching the state of eternal return; the cycle repeats, resulting in each event line having its own eternal return, preserving monadic homeostasis. (...) Thus, "amor fati" is enriched by extending fixed eternal recurrences with all "inter-idem" variations, ultimately reaching a fertile ground for ataraxia. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify the creative environment of the technical colleges operating in Gaza Strip. The analytical descriptive method was used through a questionnaire which was randomly distributed to 289 employees of the technical colleges in Gaza Strip with a total number of (1168) employees and a response rate equal to (79.2%) of the sample study. The results confirmed the existence of a high degree of approval for the dimensions of the creative environment with a relative weight of (75.19%) (...) according to the perspective of the employees of the technical colleges in Gaza Strip. The results of the study showed a high level of creative environment (fluency, flexibility, originality, sensitivity to problems) in the technical colleges in Gaza Strip, where the field (fluency) ranked first and relative weight (76.86%), in the second place came the area (sense of problems) and relative weight (74.89%). The field of elasticity came in third place with a relative weight of (74.59%). Finally, the field of originality came in fourth and final rank with a relative weight of (74.41%). The results showed that there are differences between the technical colleges in the principles of the creative environment in all fields and the overall degree except for the field of flexibility. The most available colleges in these principles were the university college of applied sciences, and that was the least of the Faculty of Al-Aqsa Society. The results showed that there were differences according to the age variable in the areas of creative environment only in the sense of problems for age groups (less than 30 years) and (from 40 to 50 years). The researchers suggested a number of recommendations, the need to enhance the dimensions of the creative environment in technical colleges by working to improve the faculties of fluency, flexibility, originality and sensitivity to problems. The need to work on continuity and improve aspects of the creative environment of the colleges and the creation of new and innovative ways to support and develop and support these aspects combined. Necessity of technical colleges to continue to develop the creative environment (fluency, flexibility, originality, sensitivity to problems) for employees by engaging them in specialized training courses for creative thinking and problem solving. Developing work procedures with new innovative methods that will accomplish the various tasks quickly and accurately, and provide the effort, time and costs. The researchers urged more future studies that address the same variables of the current study in the field of creative environment and applied to other sectors. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to present a first list of ethical concerns that may arise from research and personal use of virtual reality (VR) and related technology, and to offer concrete recommendations for minimizing those risks. Many of the recommendations call for focused research initiatives. In the first part of the article, we discuss the relevant evidence from psychology that motivates our concerns. In Section “Plasticity in the Human Mind,” we cover some of the main results suggesting (...) that one’s environment can influence one’s psychological states, as well as recent work on inducing illusions of embodiment. Then, in Section “Illusions of Embodiment and Their Lasting Effect,” we go on to discuss recent evidence indicating that immersion in VR can have psychological effects that last after leaving the virtual environment. In the second part of the article, we turn to the risks and recommendations. We begin, in Section “The Research Ethics of VR,” with the research ethics of VR, covering six main topics: the limits of experimental environments, informed consent, clinical risks, dual-use, online research, and a general point about the limitations of a code of conduct for research. Then, in Section “Risks for Individuals and Society,” we turn to the risks of VR for the general public, covering four main topics: long-term immersion, neglect of the social and physical environment, risky content, and privacy. We offer concrete recommendations for each of these 10 topics, summarized in Table 1. (shrink)

The early modern period was the natural historical habitat of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, i.e., the demand that everything must have a cause, or reason. It is in this period that the principle was explicitly articulated and named, and throughout the period we find numerous formulations and variants of the PSR and its closely related ‘ex nihilo nihil fit’ principle, which the early moderns inherited from medieval philosophy. Contemporary discussions of these principles were not restricted to (...) philosophy. “Nothing will come of nothing; speak again” old King Lear tells his daughter Cordelia at the beginning of Shakespeare’s celebrated tragedy, and in early modern science, conservation principles were the order of the day. Within philosophy, Malebranche stipulates that there cannot be an effect without a cause, and Berkeley motivates his idealism by an appeal to ‘ex nihilo nihil fit.’ Were we to try to provide an exhaustive survey the various formulations of the PSR in this period – including the weaker ones – we would be writing an encyclopedia. In fact, one wonders whether any early modern thinker was willing to accept a wholesale rejection of the PSR, i.e., a view which states that no fact requires an explanation. Moreover, the view that many – perhaps most – facts require an explanation seems to be tacitly assumed even by us today, in both our theoretical and colloquial discourse. For these reasons, this chapter will focus on two early modern philosophers who advocated very strong (i.e., virtually exceptionless) versions of the PSR: Benedict de Spinoza and G.W. Leibniz. Following a brief overview of Descartes’s restricted endorsement of the PSR, I will turn to discuss the central features of the PSR in the writings of Spinoza (§2) and those of Leibniz (§3). In the cases of each of these philosophers, we will examine carefully: (i) their main statements of the PSR, (ii) the scope they assign to the principle (i.e., what requires an explanation and what counts as an explanation), (iii) the modal strength they assign to the principle, (iv) the main implications they draw from the principle, (v) exceptions to the principle, and, finally, (vi) the justification of the principle. In §4, we will study a principle, complementing the PSR, namely, the assertion that everything and every fact must have an effect (or as Leibniz would put it: “nothing is sterile”). (shrink)

Kant's obscure essay entitled An Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Quantities into Philosophy has received virtually no attention in the Kant literature. The essay has been in English translation for over twenty years, though not widely available. In his original 1983 translation, Gordon Treash argues that the Negative Quantities essay should be understood as part of an ongoing response to the philosophy of Christian Wolff. Like Hoffmann and Crusius before him, the Kant of 1763 is at odds with (...) the Leibnizian-Wolffian tradition of deductive metaphysics. He joins his predecessors in rejecting the assumption that the law of contradiction alone can provide proof of the principle of sufficient reason: -/- In his rejection of the possibility of deducing all philosophic truth from the law of contradiction, however, and in the clear recognition that this impossibility has immediate consequences for defense of the law of sufficient reason, Kant's work most definitely and positively constitutes a line of succession from Hoffmann and Crusius (Treash, 1983, p. 25). -/- The recognition that Kant's Negative Quantities essay is part of a response to the tradition of deductive metaphysics is, without a doubt, an important contribution to the Kant literature. However, there is still more to be said about this neglected essay. The full significance of the paper becomes known through its ties to a second, empiricist line of succession. Clues to this second line of succession can be found in Kant's prefatory remarks concerning Euler's 1748 Reflections on Space and Time and Crusius' 1749 Guidance in the Orderly and Careful Consideration of Natural Events. As I will show, these prefatory remarks suggest a reading of Kant's Negative Quantities paper that reaches beyond German deductive metaphysics to engage a debate regarding the application of mathematics in philosophy initiated by George Berkeley. (shrink)

Some forms of defining PNC in Aristotle’s works are as follows: a) Everything must be either affirmed or denied (φάναι ἢ ἀποφάναι). (Met., B, 996b28-29) or: it will not be possible to assert and deny the same thing truly at the same time. (Met., Γ, 1008a36-b1) In other words, ‘contradictory statements (ἀντικειμένας φάσεις) are not at the same time true. (Met., Γ, 1011b13-14) Also, ‘It is impossible that contradictories (ἀντίφασιν) should be at the same time true of the same (...) thing.’ (Met., Γ, 1011b15-16) Also, ‘Opposite statements (ἀντικειμένας φάσεις) can never be true of the same subjects.’ (Met., K, 1062a33-34; 1063b15-17) Also, ‘Of all affirmation or negation one is impossible. (PsA., A, 11, 77a22) b) A thing cannot at the same time be and not be. (Met., B, 996b30-31; Γ, 1006a3-5) This can also be extended to many other similar pairs of opposites: ‘The same thing cannot at the same time be and not be, or admit any other similar pair of opposites.’ (Met., K, 1061b34-1062a2) Also, ‘It will be possible for the same thing to be and not to be, except in virtue of an ambiguity.’ (Met., Γ, 1006b18-19) This is also asserted in another similar way: it is impossible that it should be at the same time true to say the same thing is a thing and is not a thing.’ (Met., Γ, 1006b33-34) c) ‘The same attribute cannot at the same time belong (ὑπάρχειν) and not belong to the same object in the same respect.’ (Met., Γ, 1005b19-21) d) Those positive and negative propositions are said to be contradictory which have the same subject and predicate. (OI, I, 7, 17a33-35) The opposition between an affirmation and a denial makes contradictories (ἀντίφασεως). (PsA., A, 2, 72a11-14) Based on Aristotle’s definition, ‘An affirmation is opposed to a denial in the sense which I denote by the term ‘contradictory’ (ἀντίφατικως), when, while the subject remains the same, the affirmation is of universal character and the denial is not.’ (OI., I, 7, 17b16-19) 1) Characteristics of PNC a) It is the most certain (Met., Γ, 1005b22-23 and b11) and the most indisputable (Met., Γ, 1006a5-6) of all principles. b) It is impossible: to believe its contrary (Met., Γ, 1005b24-30); to be really in that position (Met., Γ, 1008b11-13); and to defend it. (OI, I, 9, 18b17-19) Nonetheless, Aristotle thinks that many of the writers about nature assert the contrary of PNC and use a language opposite to it. (Met., Γ, 1005b35-1006a3) c) It is the starting point of all the other axioms. (Met., Γ, 1005b32-34) d) It is not hypothetical. (Met., Γ, 1005b13-17) e) Contradictories are extremely opposed to each other. (Met., Γ, 1007a1-4) f) Believing in PNC saves substance and essence and not believing in it makes all attributes accidents and there will be nothing as being essentially something. The reason is that something which essentially is a being cannot avoid being that thing. (Met., Γ, 1007a20-29 and b16-18) g) PNC supports plurality of things because otherwise all things will be one: ‘If all contradictories are true of the same subject at the same time, evidently all things will be one. For the same thing will be a trireme, a wall, and a man, if it is equally possible to affirm and deny anything of anything.’ (Met., Γ, 1007b18-22) In fact, PNC supports difference: ‘For if contradictories can be predicated alike of each subject, one thing will in no wise differ from another; for if it differs, this difference will be something true and peculiar to it.’ (Met., Γ, 1008a25-27) h) To accept truth and falsity, whether in an absolute sense (e.g. A is more true than B; or C is less true than D) entails PNC. (Met., Γ, 1008b2-7 and b31-35; 1009a2-5) In fact, PNC is entailed by accepting true affirmation. (Met., K, 1062b7-11) i) Judging and choosing between at least two things entails PNC: you cannot choose one as better than another without a previous judging that one is A and the other not A. (Met., Γ, 1008b18-24) The same is true about avoiding. (Met., Γ, 1008b24-29) j) PNC guarantees speaking and saying anything intelligible because otherwise e.g. saying ‘yes’ means both yes and no. (Met., Γ, 1008b7-13) k) Contradictories do not accept intermediates that means we must either affirm or deny a predicate on a subject and there is no third option. (Met., Γ, 1011b23-24; Met., I, 1055b1-2; PsA., A, 2, 72a11-14; Met., I, 1057a33-36) l) PNC is applicable also to the future time. (OI., I, 9, 19a28-29) m) PNC is presupposed by the least semantic of words. If we accept that each word has a meaning and, thus, signifies something definite, we cannot accept that it has the contradictory meaning and signies contradictory things and this approves PNC. Thus, Aristotle asks the opponent of PNC to say just one word, a significant word and takes this as the demonstration of PNC because by saying the word e.g. ‘man’ you have already signified man and not-man. (Met., Γ, 1005a11-13 and a18-22; 1006a28-31 and b13-15) Therefore, signification entails PNC: ‘He, then, who says this is and is not denies what he affirms, so that what the word signifies, he says it does not signify; and this is impossible. Therefore, if ‘This is’ signifies something, one cannot truly assert the contradictory.’ (Met., K, 1062a16-20) He says again: ‘If the word signifies something and this can be truly asserted of it, it necessarily is this; and it is not possible that that which is necessary should ever not be: it is not possible therefore to make the opposed assertions truly of the same subject.’ (Met., K, 1062a20-23; cf. Met., K, 1062a24-31) n) At Met., 4, 3, 1005b9-10 (check???) PNC is called as principle of things (ἀρχὰς τοῦ πράγματος). (quoted from B215, 517) . (shrink)

Dâwûd al-Qarisî (Dâvûd al-Karsî) was a versatile and prolific 18th century Ottoman scholar who studied in İstanbul and Egypt and then taught for long years in various centers of learning like Egypt, Cyprus, Karaman, and İstanbul. He held high esteem for Mehmed Efendi of Birgi (Imâm Birgivî/Birgili, d.1573), out of respect for whom, towards the end of his life, Karsî, like Birgivî, occupied himself with teaching in the town of Birgi, where he died in 1756 and was buried next to (...) Birgivî. Better known for his following works on Arabic language and rhetoric and on the prophetic traditions (hadith): Sharḥu uṣûli’l-ḥadîth li’l-Birgivî; Sharḥu’l-Ḳaṣîdati’n-nûniyya (two commentaries, in Arabic and Turkish); Şarḥu’l-Emsileti’l-mukhtalifa fi’ṣ-ṣarf (two commentaries, in Arabic and Turkish); Sharḥu’l-Binâʾ; Sharḥu’l-ʿAvâmil; and Sharḥu İzhâri’l-asrâr, Karsî has actually composed textbooks in quite different fields. Hence the hundreds of manuscript copies of his works in world libraries. Many of his works were also recurrently printed in the Ottoman period. One of the neglected aspects of Karsî is his identity as a logician. Although he authored ambitious and potent works in the field of logic, this aspect of him has not been subject to modern studies. Even his bibliography has not been established so far (with scattered manuscript copies of his works and incomplete catalogue entries). This article primarily and in a long research based on manuscript copies and bibliographic sources, identifies twelve works on logic that Karsî has authored. We have clarified the works that are frequently mistaken for each other, and, especially, have definitively established his authorship of a voluminous commentary on al-Kâtibî’s al-Shamsiyya, of which commentary a second manuscript copy has been identified and described together with the other copy. Next is handled his most famous work of logic, the Sharhu Îsâghûcî, which constitutes an important and assertive ring in the tradition of commentaries on Îsâghûcî. We describe in detail the nine manuscript copies of this work that have been identified in various libraries. The critical text of Karsî’s Sharhu Îsâghûcî, whose composition was finished on 5 March 1745, has been prepared based on the following four manuscripts: (1) MS Kayseri Raşid Efendi Kütüphanesi, No. 857, ff.1v-3v, dated 1746, that is, only one year after the composition of the work; (2) MS Bursa İnebey Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, Genel, No.794B, ff.96v-114v, dated 1755; (3) MS Millet Kütüphanesi, Ali Emiri Efendi Arapça, No. 1752, ff.48v-58r, dated 1760; (4) MS Beyazıt Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, Beyazıt, No. 3129, ff.41v-55v, dated 8 March 1772. While preparing the critical text, we have applied the Center for Islamic Studies (İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi, İSAM)’s method of optional text choice. The critical text is preceded by a content analysis. Karsî is well aware of the preceding tradition of commentary on Îsâghûcî, and has composed his own commentary as a ‘simile’ or alternative to the commentary by Mollâ Fanârî which was famous and current in his own day. Karsî’s statement “the commentary in one day and one night” is a reference to Mollâ Fanârî who had stated that he started writing his commentary in the morning and finished it by the evening. Karsî, who spent long years in the Egyptian scholarly and cultural basin, adopted the religious-sciences-centered ‘instrumentalist’ understanding of logic that was dominant in the Egypt-Maghrib region. Therefore, no matter how famous they were, he criticized those theoretical, long, and detailed works of logic which mingled with philosophy; and defended and favored authoring functional and cogent logic texts that were beneficial, in terms of religious sciences, to the seekers of knowledge and the scholars. Therefore, in a manner not frequently encountered in other texts of its kind, he refers to the writings and views of Muhammad b. Yûsuf al-Sanûsî (d.1490), the great representative of this logical school in the Egyptian-Maghrib region. Where there is divergence between the views of the ‘earlier scholars’ (mutaqaddimûn) like Ibn Sînâ and his followers and the ‘later scholars’ (muta’akhkhirûn), i.e., post-Fakhr al-dîn al-Râzî logicians, Karsî is careful to distance himself from partisanship, preferring sometimes the views of the earliers, other times those of the laters. For instance, on the eight conditions proposed for the realization of contradiction, he finds truth to be with al-Fârâbî, who proposed “unity in the predicative attribution” as the single condition for the realization of contradiction. Similarly, on the subject matter of Logic, he tried to reconcile the mutaqaddimûn’s notion of ‘second intelligibles’ with the muta’akhkhirûn’s notion of ‘apprehensional and declarational knowledge,’ suggesting that not much difference exists between the two, on the grounds that both notions are limited to the aspect of ‘known things that lead to the knowledge of unknown things.’ Karsî asserts that established and commonly used metaphors have, according to the verifying scholars, signification by correspondence (dalâlat al-mutâbaqah), adding also that it should not be ignored that such metaphors may change from society to society and from time to time. Karsî also endorses the earlier scholars’ position concerning the impossibility of quiddity (mâhiyya) being composed of two co-extensive parts, and emphasizes that credit should not be given to later scholars’ position who see it possible. According to the verifying scholars (muhaqqîqûn), it is possible to make definition (hadd) by mentioning only difference (fasl), in which case it becomes an imperfect definition (hadd nâqis). He is of the opinion that the definition of the proposition (qadiyya) in al-Taftâzânî’s Tahdhîb is clearer and more complete: “a proposition is an expression that bears the possibility of being true or false”. He states that in the division of proposition according to quantity what is taken into consideration is the subject (mawdû‘) in categorical propositions, and the temporal aspect of the antecedent (muqaddam) in hypothetical propositions. As for the unquantified, indefinite proposition (qadiyya muhmalah), Karsî assumes that if it is not about the problems of the sciences, then it is virtually/potentially a particular proposition (qadiyya juz’iyyah); but if it is about the problems of the sciences, then it is virtually/potentially a universal proposition (qadiyya kulliyyah). This being the general rule about the ambiguous (muhmal) propositions, he nevertheless contends that, because its subject (mawdû‘) is negated, it is preferable to consider a negative ambiguous (sâliba muhmalah) proposition like “human (insân) is not standing” to be a virtually/potentially universal negative (sâliba kulliyyâh) proposition. He states that a disjunctive hypothetical proposition (shartiyya al-munfasila) that is composed of more than two parts/units is only seemingly so, and that in reality it cannot be composed of more than two units. Syllogism (qiyâs), according to Karsî, is the ultimate purpose (al-maqsad al-aqsâ) and the most valuable subject-matter of the science of Logic. For him, the entire range of topics that are handled before this one are only prolegomena to it. This approach of Karsî clearly reveals how much the ‘demonstration (burhân)-centered’ approach of the founding figures of the Muslim tradition of logic like al-Fârâbî and Ibn Sînâ has changed. al-Abharî, in his Îsâghûjî makes no mention of ‘conversion by contradiction’ (‘aks al-naqîd). Therefore, Karsî, too, in his commentary, does not touch upon the issue. However, in his Îsâghûjî al-jadîd Karsî does handle the conversion by contradiction and its rules. Following the method of Îsâghûjî, in his commentary Karsî shortly touches on the four figures (shakl) of conjuctive syllogism (qiyâs iqtirânî) and their conditions, after which he passes to the first figure (shakl), which is considered ‘the balance of the sciences’ (mi‘yâr al-‘ulûm), explaining the four moods (darb) of it. In his Îsâghûjî al-jadîd, however, Karsî handles all the four figures (shakl) with all their related moods (darb), where he speaks of fife moods (darb) of the fourth figure (shakl). The topic of ‘modal propositions’ (al-muwajjahât) and of ‘modal syllogism’ (al-mukhtalitât), both of which do not take place in the Îsâghûjî, are not mentioned by Karsî as well, either in his commentary on Îsâghûjî or in his Îsâghûjî al-jadîd. Karsî proposes that the certainties (yaqîniyyât), of which demonstration (burhân) is made, have seven, not six, divisions. After mentioning (1) axioms/first principles (awwaliyyât), (2) observata/sensuals (mushâhadât), (3) experta/empiricals (mujarrabât), (4) acumenalia (hadthiyyât), (5) testata (mutawâtirât), and (6) instictives (fitriyyât), that is, all the ‘propositions accompanied by their demonstrations,’ Karsî states that these six divisions, which do not need research and reflection (nazar), are called badîhiyyât (self-evidents), and constitute the foundations (usûl) of certainties (yaqîniyyât). As the seventh division he mentions (7) the nazariyyât (theoreticals), which are known via the badîhiyyât, end up in them, and therefore convey certainty (yaqîn). For Karsî, the nazariyyât/theoreticals, which constitute the seventh division of yaqîniyyât/certainties, are too numerous, and constitute the branches (far‘) of yaqîniyyât. Every time the concept of ‘Mughâlata’ (sophistry) comes forth in the traditional sections on the five arts usually appended to logic works, Karsî often gives examples from what he sees as extreme sûfî sayings, lamenting that these expressions are so widespread and held in esteem. He sometimes criticizes these expressions. However, it is observed that he does not reject tasawwuf in toto, but excludes from his criticism the mystical views and approaches of the truth-abiding (ahl al-haqq), shârî‘â-observant (mutasharri‘) leading sufis who have reached to the highest level of karâmah. (shrink)

Quentin Meillassoux’s ‘Spectral Dilemma offers philosophy an answer to an age old problem, one that Pascal had intimated on in the wager. Is it better to believe in God for life or abstain from belief and declare atheism? The paradox of theism and atheism has separated philosophy for centuries by limiting the possibilities for real thought. For Meillassoux, there is more at stake than just the limitations of thought. Both atheism and theism have exhausted all the conditions of human life. (...) In order to answer this paradox Meillassoux must combine religious insight that the dead must be resurrected with the atheist conviction that God does not exist. (Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, Philosophy in the Making p.87). The aforementioned insight, grounds Meillassoux’s position in what he calls a Divine Ethics. The concept of the Divine carries both atheism and theism to their ultimate consequences to unveil the truth that … “God does not exist, and also that it is quite necessary to believe in God (Harman p.236). The Divine links both assertions in an absolute ethics which Meillassoux calls Divinology. This leads us to our next question what is the Spectral Dilemma? In order to answer this question, we cannot rely solely on what the dilemma is, for it is not, a sufficient account of what Meillassoux is trying to solve. We must proceed to understand the conditions of what Divine Ethics are, and how the Divinology can best represent life for both the living and the dead. What is a spectre? According to Meillassoux it is a dead person who has not been properly mourned (Meillassoux, Spectral Dilemma p.261). This person’s death haunts us. This haunting is the mere fact that we cannot mourn their loss, for as time passes by, our bond with the dead, or dearly departed, proves to be inadequate for our own lives. This haunting leads us to utter despair. The sheer horror of their death is a burden that lays heavy on our backs; and not just our own backs, or our families backs, but for all those people who have crossed their paths in history (Meillassoux p. 262). These terrible deaths are called Essential Spectres and they include all deaths, such as, odious, premature, the death of children, the death of parents; and all of those poor individuals who know that their own destiny will at some point in time, be the same as these poor individuals (Meillassoux p.262). But it is precisely all death in its inconclusive finality that haunts us all, not just natural deaths or even violent grueling death and causalities of war. These essential spectres, are the dead who refuse to Passover, even though they are gone. This concept must seem absurd to any reader to believe in them, but still, Meillassoux makes his point that these essential spectres still cry out to us all, that they still exist with us (Meillassoux p.262). Meillassoux claims that the completion of mourning must occur and Essential Mourning, which is described as an accomplishment of a living relationship with the dead, as opposed to maintaining a morbid bond with those who have survived after their deaths (Meillassoux p.263). According to Meillassoux, essential mourning grants us the possibility, of forming a bond again with the dearly departed (Meillassoux p.263). This bond actively animates their memory into our lives again, but the concept of accomplishment means, that to live again with those essential spectres … “[R]ather than relating to them with the memory of their morbid death” (Meillassoux p.263). In order to fully understand this possibility, we must ask the question does God exist. Is there a merciful spirit, which transcends all of humanity? Is this God working in the world? If so, then why do essential spectres exist? How is it possible that these terrible deaths occur in the world and are allowed by such a God? If this is so, that God allows these deaths to occur then perhaps God is not all powerful? Perhaps this so called transcendent principle is absent in the world (Meillassoux p.263).Meillassoux states that both the religious and atheist options do not allow for essential mourning to take place. Both these positions lead to disappear when confronting death. What is needed is what will follow in the rest of this paper … a Divine Inexistence. We need to assert the existence of a Virtual-God that is both inexistent and possible, but also contingent and unmasterable (Harman p.89). The Divine Inexistence is the main concept of Meillassoux’s Divinology but also the answer to the spectral dilemma, that a new ethics is both possible and needed. This Divine Ethics will both save Essential Spectres and Philosophy. My essential claim is that the actual article ‘Spectral Dilemma’ published in collapse Journal, is insufficient in fully answering the problem of essential spectres. The juxtaposition of atheism and theism is not enough to philosophically explain the significance of the Divine Inexistence. The article is not lengthy enough to explain how ontology, contingent-metaphysics and ethics relate to the fundamental problem. The Divine Inexistence must be fully articulated with the entirety of Meillassoux’s Divinology. I will attempt to fully express the entirety of Meillassoux for my reader, while at the same time, offering a comprehensive answer to the spectral dilemma. -/- . (shrink)

Good governance, first appeared in the nineties within the United Nations, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund refers to describe how public organizations best conduct public affairs and deliver public goods and services. Today, about three decades later good governance seems to be still popular since there are still many challenges ahead for many governments especially in less-developed and developing countries. Hence the notion of good governance was emerged as a normative commencement of the principles, values and ethics to (...) realise the acts of governance. Some thoughts on good governance and related topics advocated by three great ancient philosophers, who appear to be relevant at the present time are considered herein. One of the said philosophers is Kautilya (also known as Chanakya and Vishnugupta), who lived in India around 150AD. The others are the two great Greek philosophers Plato (427- 347BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC), who stand with Socrates as the shapers of the whole intellectual tradition of the West. The thoughts are extracted from that detailed manual of state-craft and the science of living known as the Arthashastra written by one of classical India’s greatest minds Kautilya, Plato’s great work known as ‘The Republic’ and Aristotle’s treatise titled ‘The Politics”. The objective of this paper is to study the thoughts of ancient Greek philosophers who lived many centuries ago and their ideas are still relevant today. (shrink)

A principle, according to which any scientific theory can be mathematized, is investigated. Social science, liberal arts, history, and philosophy are meant first of all. That kind of theory is presupposed to be a consistent text, which can be exhaustedly represented by a certain mathematical structure constructively. In thus used, the term “theory” includes all hypotheses as yet unconfirmed as already rejected. The investigation of the sketch of a possible proof of the principle demonstrates that it should be (...) accepted rather a metamathematical axiom about the relation of mathematics and reality. The main statement is formulated as follows: Any scientific theory admits isomorphism to some mathematical structure in a way constructive. Its investigation needs philosophical means. Husserl’s phenomenology is what is used, and then the conception of “bracketing reality” is modelled to generalize Peano arithmetic in its relation to set theory in the foundation of mathematics. The obtained model is equivalent to the generalization of Peano arithmetic by means of replacing the axiom of induction with that of transfinite induction. The sketch of the proof is organized in five steps: a generalization of epoché; involving transfinite induction in the transition between Peano arithmetic and set theory; discussing the finiteness of Peano arithmetic; applying transfinite induction to Peano arithmetic; discussing an arithmetical model of reality. Accepting or rejecting the principle, two kinds of mathematics appear differing from each other by its relation to reality. Accepting the principle, mathematics has to include reality within itself in a kind of Pythagoreanism. These two kinds are called in paper correspondingly Hilbert mathematics and Gödel mathematics. The sketch of the proof of the principle demonstrates that the generalization of Peano arithmetic as above can be interpreted as a model of Hilbert mathematics into Gödel mathematics therefore showing that the former is not less consistent than the latter, and the principle is an independent axiom. The present paper follows a pathway grounded on Husserl’s phenomenology and “bracketing reality” to achieve the generalized arithmetic necessary for the principle to be founded in alternative ontology, in which there is no reality external to mathematics: reality is included within mathematics. That latter mathematics is able to self-found itself and can be called Hilbert mathematics in honour of Hilbert’s program for self-founding mathematics on the base of arithmetic. The principle of universal mathematizability is consistent to Hilbert mathematics, but not to Gödel mathematics. Consequently, its validity or rejection would resolve the problem which mathematics refers to our being; and vice versa: the choice between them for different reasons would confirm or refuse the principle as to the being. An information interpretation of Hilbert mathematics is involved. It is a kind of ontology of information. The Schrödinger equation in quantum mechanics is involved to illustrate that ontology. Thus the problem which of the two mathematics is more relevant to our being is discussed again in a new way A few directions for future work can be: a rigorous formal proof of the principle as an independent axiom; the further development of information ontology consistent to both kinds of mathematics, but much more natural for Hilbert mathematics; the development of the information interpretation of quantum mechanics as a mathematical one for information ontology and thus Hilbert mathematics; the description of consciousness in terms of information ontology. (shrink)

Without doubt, the principle of least action is a fundamental principle in classical mechanics. Contemporary physicists, however, consider the PLA as a purely mathematical principle – even an axiom which they cannot completely justify. Such an account stands in sharp contrast with the historical meaning of the PLA. When the principle was introduced in the 1740s, by Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, its meaning was much more versatile. For Maupertuis the principle of least action signified that (...) nature is thrifty or economical in all its actions, i.e., that nature avoids to do anything unnecessary. Maupertuis understood the principle in teleological terms and even considered the principle as an expression of God’s wisdom. It has been correctly pointed out by historians that Maupertuis in his later years moved towards a more speculative and metaphysical approach, whereas his contemporary Euler and later Lagrange, wanted to avoid such theological and metaphysical implications and frame the PLA in purely mathematical terms. Such readings, however, have had the unintended side-effect that they lose out of sight the question how the mathematical and metaphysical aspect of the principle of least action fit together within Maupertuis’ own work. Investigating if and how the mathematical and metaphysical aspects of the PLA are compatible within Maupertuis’ thought will be the main goal of this paper. (shrink)

Therefore, having survived the second Covid year has taught us other lessons on applying these principles more efficiently and creatively. And the results so far have given us some confidence that will likely make our third Covid year (i.e., 2022) a little less dreadful.

Distribution of responsibility is one of the main focus areas in discussions about climate change ethics. Most of these discussions deal with the distribution of responsibility for climate change mitigation at the international level. The aim of this paper is to investigate if and how these principles can be used to inform the search for a fair distribution of responsibility for climate change adaptation on the local level. We found that the most influential distribution principles on the international level were (...) in turn built on one or more of seven basic principles: (P1) equal shares, (P2) desert, (P3) beneficiary pays, (P4) ability, (P5) self-help, (P6) limited responsibility for the worst off, and (P7) status quo preservation. It was found that all the basic principles, but P1, P3, and P7, are to some extent translatable to local climate adaptation. Two major problems hamper their usefulness on the local level: (1) several categories of agents need to take on responsibility; and (2) emissions do not work as a base for all principles. P4, P5, and P6 are applicable to local adaptation without changes. P4 is of particular importance as it seems to solve the first problem. P2 is applicable only if the second problem is solved, which can be achieved by using risk of harm instead of emissions as the basis for desert. (shrink)

What can it mean to criticize when you are inside the work itself? In a immersive electronic or digital environment critic is not distanced on a platform based on firm principles. Yet criticism self-awareness and commentary remain possible. This essay examines various techniques for dealing with immersive environments critically.

Davies argues that the ontology of artworks as performances offers a principled way of explaining work-relativity of modality. Object oriented contextualist ontologies of art (Levinson) cannot adequately address the problem of work-relativity of modal properties because they understand looseness in what counts as the same context as a view that slight differences in the work-constitutive features of provenance are work-relative. I argue that it is more in the spirit of contextualism to understand looseness as context-dependent. This points to the general (...) problem—the context of appreciation is not robust enough to ground modal intuitions about objective entities. In general, when epistemology dictates ontology there is always a threat of anti-realism, scepticism and relativism. Davies also appeals to the modality principle—an entity’s essential properties are all and only its constitutive properties. Davies understands essentiality in a traditional way: a property P is an essential property of an object o iff o could not exist and lack P. Kit Fine has recently made a convincing case for the view that the notion of essence is not to be understood in modal terms. I explore some of the implications of this view for Davies’ modal argument for the performance theory. (shrink)

In this article the possibilities of expanding the boundaries of the knowledge and tradition of art philosophy in Turkey through the works of names outside the discipline of philosophy are investigated. For this purpose the production of architectural historian Doğan Kuban is discussed. Kuban’s works are evaluated from a philosophical perspective and it is tried to justify that they should be included in the philosophy of art literature. It has been accepted by the researchers that aesthetics/philosophy of art (...) in Turkey started with the effect of westernization after the Tanzimat. The main problems of the few studies that follow the development of aesthetics are that they examine aesthetics, which developed mainly through literary figures and philosophers who had less space than them, until the establishment of the Republic, only through the works of professional philosophers since the Republic, and they exclude the idea of tradition by not establishing a connection between the local thinkers they have examined and ending their development line with İsmail Tunalı. Common problems in research create the impression that the acceptance of aesthetics or philosophy of art as an activity that only the philosopher can do is accepted as a prejudice. However, philosophy of art is not a field specific to philosophers and limiting the development and accumulation of philosophy of art in Turkey to the work of philosophers narrows the scope of discussion. When a philosophical approach to the subject is sought other than philosophers, the opportunity to meet important names in different disciplines and to read them with a new eye increases. When approached from this perspective, Doğan Kuban’s (1926-2021) works deserve to be questioned in terms of art philosophy. It is noteworthy that Kuban’s production which started in the 1950s and lasted for about 70 years presents a wide field of data and interpretation and that he often attempts theory by reminding the absence of criticism and philosophy in our culture. There are also thinkers who refer to Kuban’s interest in philosophy, aesthetics and philosophy of art. However, Kuban’s relevance to philosophy and aesthetics/art philosophy has not been studied extensively. In the article firstly answers will be sought to the questions of what philosophy and philosophy of art are, and then Kuban’s philosophy of art will be revealed according to the criteria to be determined here. Kuban’s philosophy of art will be examined in three stages. His own theoretical approach will be analyzed by reviewing his objections to the tradition of philosophy of art. In the next step, his views on the philosophy of architecture and the philosophy of Turkish art, which he pursued throughout his production as a quest, will be examined. Finally the problems in Kuban’s philosophy of art will be pointed out and its possibilities will be emphasized. Philosophy is the ability to redefine the concepts starting from the most basic/original problems in any field where one doubts the answers, to determine the principles of the field, to answer the sub-questions with principles in line with consistency and validity, and to construct his own explanation model for the structure of the field by associating these answers. In order to make philosophy of art and philosophy of architecture it is necessary to answer the basic questions of the relevant field, to reach conceptual and principled goals, and to present a model of explanation of the structure of the field within a certain method. In the context of the criteria of art philosophy determined here, Kuban’s thoughts can be questioned in terms of philosophy of art. The philosophy of art, the philosophy of architecture and the philosophy of Turkish art, which became evident by the bringing together of different pieces in Kuban’s works, is a continuous and mutually determined effort. The thinker who criticizes the thinking styles and provisions of Western aesthetics, has created his own concept map with redefinitions and conceptualizations. Kuban redefined the concepts in the field of study, based on these he constructed his understanding of art, the philosophy of architecture and tried to create a model of explanation of Turkish art in which he revealed its history, evolution and basic features. Criticizing the views of C. E. Arseven, J. Strzygowski, E. Diez and O. Aslanapa, Kuban tried to define Turkish art in his own way and tried to explain the basic principles of Turkish art through monumental and civil architecture. Even though this model of explanation has deficiencies it offers new research opportunities to history of art and philosophy researchers with the questions it asks, the concepts it highlights and its unresolved aspects. With his philosophical awareness, criticisms of the philosophy of art, the philosophy of architecture and the attempt to construct the theory of Turkish art, Kuban should be included in the subject area of the philosophy of art studies in Turkey. Evaluation of Kuban’s thoughts by including them in the accumulation of art philosophy in our history of thought will both broaden and diversify the horizon of the field of art philosophy and will enable the philosophy of art to be considered in the context of new relationships between individuals and disciplines by following the traces of thinkers from such different fields. (shrink)

In the essay I intend to revalue the descriptive principle in the contemporaryAmazonian geography, as presented to us by the geographer from Pará EidorfeMoreira (1960). Laterally, I call the attention of Amazonian geographers to thesensitivity of his work, which is not present in the bibliography of the training coursesin Geography in Pará. The methodological strategy is descriptive-interpretative with aphenomenological tone. I conclude: the refusal of the description is installed by aprejudiced effect of our current formation in relation to the (...) procedures consideredtraditional; the production of knowledge, eager for explanation/analysis, can produceethical violence; the abstraction - which flirts with abstractionism - imposed by thehasty generalization of certain ideas about the Amazon, from geographical studies,installs an artificial cut between the symbolic and the emotional in the act of makinggeography in our region. (shrink)

In this Interview, Professor Robert B. Brandom answered ten detailed questions about his philosophy of Rational Pragmatism and Semantic Expressivism, grouped into four topics. 1. Metaphysics and Anthropology, 2. Pragmatics and Semantics, 3. Epistemic Expressivism and 4. Philosophy of Logic. With his careful answers Professor Brandom offers many additional insights into his rigorously constructed account of the relationship “between what we say and think, and what we are saying and thinking about” around the human practice of asking for and giving (...) reasons. A final, additional question pointed at a principal motivation for putting together the present issue: how to reconcile Wittgenstein’s assertion that philosophy must not proffer any theories with the very explicit system of explanations Brandom has constructed. This same issue is addressed to some extent already in Professor Brandom’s new article contained in this issue, but his answer, asserting that he does not proffer a theory but only makes explicit what is already there, might be seen as an unambiguous statement of the continuous presence of a contested Wittgensteinian principle in Brandom’s work. (shrink)

This study is intended to measure the readiness of the public elementary school heads on the principles of sustainable leadership. This study utilized the mixed-method design. Creswell & Clark (2017), defined mixed methods research as a research approach that combines both qualitative and quantitative methods in a single study to gain a more comprehensive understanding of a research question or topic. This approach allows researchers to leverage the strengths of both qualitative and quantitative methods. The following major findings on the (...) quantitative aspect are: the school heads are slightly ready on the worldview principle while moderately ready to influence and complexity. However, they are highly ready to network, self-leadership, and work across boundaries. Positive themes emerged for the qualitative part with the results as: improved communication, increased motivation, and enhanced creativity. It can be concluded that the school heads are slightly ready when it comes to worldview principles. The SDO should create capacity training that could increase the readiness of the school heads on this principle of sustainable leadership. (shrink)

The paper explores Burke’s twofold solution to the paradox of negative emotions. His Philosophical Enquiry (1757/59) employs two models that stand on different anthropological principles: the Exercise Argument borrowed from authors like the Abbé Du Bos, guided by the principle of self-preservation, and the Sympathy Argument, propageted by notable men of lettres such as Lord Kames, ruled by the principle of sociability. Burke interlocks these two arguments through a teleologically-ordered physiology, in which the natural laws of the human (...) body and mind, secretly working in the depth of the nerve fibres, ensure both self-preservation and sociability. Utilizing both efficient and final causes throughout his Enquiry, Burke argues that the experiences of pain and terror – under certain conditions – are made agreeable (delight) by providence,so that the physiological mechanisms underlying these experiences could ensure the health and strenuousness of the nerve fibres amidst the corrupting pleasures of commercial society (Exercise Argument). Furthermore, due to the ambiguous character of this delight annexed to such experiences, they also function as exercises for our social passions (Sympathy Argument). Te 'egoistic' anthropological drive to remove the visceral uneasiness that dominates these experiences facilitates moral action when it is needed the most: when others in pain need our help. In accordance with the anthropocentric providentialism of the moderate Enlightenment, it is the design of the human frame that ensures the activities essential to our health (self-preservation) and moral conduct (sociability), a design that not only guarantees that pleasure, if exclusive and excessive, is 'inconvenient', and pain, if mitigated and harmless, is aesthetically agreeable, but also that our 'egoistic' drive to self-preservation ultimately improves sociability. (shrink)

This work is a response to the questions within African philosophy and African traditional religion: the question of the underlying principle in both fields of study. It is a contribution to the ongoing investigations in the areas of African philosophy and African traditional religion in search for the keys to the understanding of both fields. This piece argued , contrary to the positions of Mbiti and Koech, that the key to understanding African traditional religion is Igwebuike. It also argued (...) , in relation to African philosophy , that Igwebuike is the in tricate web of African philosophy . It has remained constant in the midst of the changes in the history of African philosophy, and has continued to persist through changes. It argued that its sense of harmony, community, complementarity and solidarity have been expressed in virtually all the perspectives of African philosophers , from the time of Tempels to the contemporary era. This position was based on the fact that Igwebuike is based on or captures the African worldview which shapes African philosophy an d religion. The method inquiry employed for the purpose of this investigation is the Igwebuike approach, which understands reality within the parameters of complementarity. (shrink)

The main purpose of this study is to introduce, analyze and propose the concept of Piety in Rousseau as a part of the ethical fundament of Positive Leadership Theory, also as a continuum of the original fundamental element of the Social Pact and its implication on the legitimization of organizational dynamics in the private sector (corporate ethics) and the impact on institutional efficiency. Given the theoretical nature of this research, the classic dialectic method has shown itself adequate once in it (...) there is a search for identification of an object (theory), its contradictions, and conflicts involved in the analyses of the problem. For that purpose, a vast bibliographical, documental e internet site research was conducted examining many of the main works about the themes studied. After presenting and dialectically analyzing the foundation of the Rousseaunian Social Pact, in convergence with the responsibility principle structure, this paper concludes by suggesting that these theoretical models can constitute the ethical basis of the management proposition of Positive Leadership as organization dynamics. (shrink)

In my paper, I establish an Ingardenian phenomenological ontology of "virtualized ficta", i.e., fictional entities introduced to virtual gaming. The first Section of my paper provides an ontology of virtualized ficta, focusing primarily on their ‘‘existential moments’’. But in order to have a firm grasp of the ontological aspects grounding the virtual work, it’s important to engage its strata. This is what I attempt to do in Section 1.2. Virtualized ficta’s intentional dependencies are strongly manifest in what I (...) call the ‘‘strata of the virtual work’’. That is, I repurpose Ingarden’s strata of the literary work, the picture, and the film to showcase that virtualized ficta, from the bottom up (i.e., from their pure ontology to aesthetics) are purely intentional entities. In short, I argue for a purely intentional account of virtualized ficta as ficta-made-virtualia, whose ontological status is determined by the creative acts of game developers and gamers. (shrink)

This paper presents the design, development, and potential impact of Echoes of Union Depot, a virtual reality (VR) game aimed at promoting historic preservation and raising public awareness about El Paso's Union Depot, a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places Inventory. The game leverages the immersive capabilities of VR technology and 360° images to engage players in exploring the site's rich history and architectural evolution. Players assume the role of a time-traveling detective, guiding lost spirits to (...) resolve their past and move on. The paper outlines the development process, highlighting the use of 360° panoramic images and 3D Vista Virtual Tour Pro software to create an accessible and user-friendly experience that fosters historic preservation awareness and cultural appreciation. The study also discusses limitations and areas for future research, including expanding the scope to include other heritage sites, working with historians and cultural consultants for accurate representations, and evaluating the game's effectiveness in promoting awareness and fostering a sense of community pride. (shrink)

Throughout history, education has always been essential for humanity's justice and fundamental for the creation of a free and satisfying society with the dissemination of knowledge. Hence, in addition to the life occurrences educating people, traditional higher education methods have played an important role for a long period. However, the age of technology has changed the educational system along with the people's lifestyles to meet the continuously changing conditions. During the past twenty years, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) led (...) to the emergence of e-learning non-traditional educational methods bringing about an innovative dimension of virtual learning. With its beneficial features provided by the Internet and various technologies, this method passes the control of time and location from the tutors to the students during the learning process. Despite the entrance of online education into the students' life many years ago, the Covid-19 outbreak initiated in 2020 turned this method into the only possible way of education for almost two years. Afterward, plenty of studies investigated its effects on students' social and academic life, mostly considering its negative impacts on their mental health and motivation due to interaction issues. They also pointed out the specific problems of tactile learner students in the lack of face-to-face design courses. As an innovative solution able to be adopted, game technologies, increasing immersion of the learner in a real-world skill, and triggering motivation are one of the best methods integrated into educational systems. Known as serious games, these games, adopted by almost any domain, convey educational content along with entertainment, increasing interaction. They train or enhance a certain skill or topic to the player by immersing them. While serious games are more expanded nowadays, they are still not being played by the mass public due to people's immersiveness expectations of a game. Hence, the Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), with their emergence, increased the players' engagement and immersion with all types of virtual environments in digital games. This technology, however, evolved serious games area most, among others, by enabling the opportunity to provide a riskless and low-cost learning environment for real-world skills. In the process of suggesting serious games as a replacement for the traditional educational methods, the most important factor is being aware of their effectiveness for education. Generally, digital games, one of the world's biggest and fastest-growing industries, rely heavily on the virtual landscape, a major part of its development process. Its design demands remarkable effort, and it directly affects the whole game's characteristics. Hence, serious games, as a type of digital game, carry the same attributes. With the appearance of virtual reality technology, gaming started to gain more immersiveness and engagement with artificial elements and environments. Although virtual landscapes were always being developed since the emergence of digital games, the studies taking virtual landscapes into account are mostly using them as a tool for enhancing real spaces, not as a domain for the sake of its development. While other design domains are applying various design methodologies, it is challenging to find a standard design methodology for the design and production of virtual landscapes in the gaming industry, leading to inconsistent and low-quality results. Hence, it comes to the question of what is the virtual landscapes' role in serious games and their effect on the data comprehension rate. Since the literature lacks regarding the gradual change of the virtual landscape in serious games and the content they transmit, this thesis aims to figure out the gradual chronological evolution of the virtual landscapes in serious games. It also aims to seek how this change and the virtual reality technology invention have affected the contents transmitted by digital games and its influence on the player interaction and learning rate. To do so, in the process of this thesis, we developed, tested, and evaluated various serious games, both text-based and with 360° photos. The steps taken revealed the reluctance of the players to follow the providing educational content and their inadequacy of interaction. Hence, the thesis seeks the reasons ending to this result and the ways of increasing this learning rate. Afterward, the thesis uses a currently available but not massively used digital game classification methodology. This methodology, which is based on the principles of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning, classifies the games based on their constituting virtual landscapes. Hence, the thesis considers all Steam games, one of the biggest video game digital distribution services, filtered with the 'education' tag, ending in 2531 digital games. Afterward, adding the 'game' tag the result reduced to 1102 games. Finally, with some manual filterings ignoring the irrelevant content, the final number decreased to 702. Sorting chronologically, we made an Excel database including the games' introductory information, the content they transmit, their release date, if they support HMD or not, and whether they are simulation games or not. Due to Steam's dating spectrum, our database includes games dating back from 1992 to 2020. Afterward, we classified all of these games using the virtual landscape classification methodology and generated their related codes based on their player scale, story, dimension, space shape, and interaction level. Investigating the results, they revealed some growth patterns relating to the content educated in the game, the VR technology, and the virtual landscape evolution. Adding the user reviews of Steam, we reverse engineered five of the best serious games on the database due to the digital game design methodology. This methodology divides the games' virtual environment into five layers, namely, player activity map (PAM), story layer, natural environment layer, virtual environment layer, and media layer. Reverse engineering the five best digital games ever, based on the IGN database, enabled us to compare the outcomes. Due to released data, we understand how the games' assets are distributed within the various layers of the virtual environment in the most successful games. Finally, the thesis aims to provide a framework based on these results for developing serious games to increase player interaction and enhance the learning rate. However, these results can be expanded to any virtual landscape other than only serious games' for their interaction enhancement. Currently, the landscape architecture domain only adopts the virtual landscape area as a tool for enhancing design in the real world. However, in the near future, landscape architects will perform in the virtual landscape area as a domain to be enhanced. Hence, that day, the results of this study will play an important role and will be a roadmap for generating highly interactive virtual landscapes. (shrink)

Drawing upon the practice of caregiving and the insights of feminist care ethics, I offer a phenomenology of caregiving through the work of Eva Feder Kittay and Emmanuel Lévinas. I argue that caregiving is a material dialectic of embodied response involving moments of leveling, attention, and interruption. In this light, the Levinasian opposition between responding to another's singularity and leveling it via parity-based principles is belied in the experience of care. Contra much of response ethics’ and care ethics’ respective literatures, (...) this dialectic suggests that they are complementary in ways that productively illuminate themes of each. I conclude by suggesting that when response and care ethics are thought together through the experience of caregiving, such labors produce finite responsibility with infinite hope. (shrink)

The present volume is the fourth issue of the Almanac series entitled ‘Evolu-tion’. Thus, one can maintain that our Almanac, which has actually turned into a Yearbook, has succeeded (see below). The title of the present volume is ‘From Big Bang to Nanorobots’. In this way we demonstrate that all phases of megaevolution and Big History are cov-ered in the articles of the present Yearbook. Several articles also present fore-casts about possible future developments. The main objective of our Yearbook as (...) well as of the previous issues (see Grinin, Korotayev, Carneiro, and Spier 2011a, Grinin, Korotayev, and Rodrigue 2011a, Grinin and Korotayev 2013a) is the creation of a unified inter-disciplinary field of research in which scientists specializing in different disci-plines could work within a framework of unified or similar paradigms, using common terminology and searching for common rules, tendencies and regularities. At the same time for the formation of such an integrated field one should use all available opportunities: theories, laws and methods. In the present volume, a number of such approaches including those which will be described below are used. (shrink)

In the past decade UNESCO has pursued a leadership role in the articulation of general principles for bioethics, as well as an extensive campaign to promulgate these principles globally.1 Since UNESCO's General Conference adopted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights in 2005, UNESCO's Bioethics Section has worked with member states to develop a "bioethics infrastructure." UNESCO also provides an "Ethics Teacher Training Course" to member states and disseminates a "core curriculum," primarily targeting medical students. The core curriculum orients (...) itself by the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights and aims to articulate a set of "bioethical principles" that provide a "common global . (shrink)

How surprising is the insight, that being equals I in the 15th lecture of the Doctrine of Science 1804/II? It might have been indeed an unexpected turn for his contemporaries in Berlin listening to Fichte for the first time, but should it be surprising for us, having at least since 2012 (the year the last volume of [Gesamtausgabe] appeared) access to all his published and unpublished works? I want to propose a way of reading Fichte, which bypasses two popular (...) and contradictory interpretations of his philosophy in the post-Jena period: (a) the Absolute is the new first principle (hence the I is just a shadow of the much higher being) and (b) his system basically remains unchanged (hence the being is nothing more than the I). At first, I analyze the functions of later Fichte’s improved version of the Kantian and Reinholdian abstract subject-object-symbolism and assign specific content to it. This will shed light on the structure and the first principle of the Doctrine of Science 1804/II. In the second section I give reasons why Fichte calls both God and I “absolute” and “pure being” and explain their relation to each other referring to a thought experiment sometimes used by Kant—an analogy between the divine and human (pure) reason. The analogical thinking of this kind remains within the borders of transcendental philosophy as long as it is used only for certain didactic purposes. (shrink)